Systems engineering approach to the reliability of complex civil infrastructure

大坝和水电行业需要描述与其运营相关的风险，特别是大坝坍塌的风险。在目前的实践中，可靠地估计风险的能力仍然很弱。究其原因，基本上都是因为现有的表征大坝风险的能力是1970年的S和1980年的S盛行的大坝安全的“极端事件”哲学。按照这种哲学，不可能考虑较小的洪水和地震的组合。除了这些实际的大坝安全问题外，这种传统的哲学没有以任何方式考虑操作员错误或程序失误，也没有体现任何对体制失误或对风险的贡献的考虑。特别是，完全省略了“个别问题的不常见组合”这一问题。 最近的研究表明，系统分析和工程有可能提供一种哲学、框架和建模方法，以解决电力行业当前表征大坝风险的能力中的许多弱点和遗漏，并超越充其量只能是风险下限估计的水平。系统建模还有可能对许多其他业务方面作出贡献，如全生命周期资产管理、水管理政策和利益相关者参与以及水库运营和维护。 拟议的研究将(A)开发大坝和水库复杂水电系统的第二代风险分析方法。所提出的方法将基于一般的系统理论，特别是系统动力学仿真。方法的验证将(B)包括实际的水电系统可靠性分析。将与行业合作伙伴共同构建一个集成的系统动力学建模环境，并将其应用于各种类型的水电系统配置。拟议的研究将使用行业合作伙伴BC Hydro，Burnaby，BC提供的案例研究进行。

The dams and hydropower industry has a demand to characterize the risk associated with its operations, and in particular, the risk of dam failure. In current practice, the capability to reliably estimate risk remains very weak. The reasons are essentially all due to the fact that the existing capability to characterize dam risk is the "extreme event" philosophy of dam safety that prevailed in the 1970's and 1980's. In terms of this philosophy, there could be no consideration of combinations of lesser floods and earthquakes. Beyond these physical dam safety concerns, this traditional philosophy does not consider operator error or procedural failures in any way, nor does it embody any consideration of institutional failures or contributions to risk. In particular the problem of "uncommon combinations of problems that individually are not uncommon" is omitted completely. Recent research has revealed that systems analysis and engineering has the potential to provide a philosophy, framework, and modeling approach to address many of these weaknesses and omissions in current capability of the power industry to characterize risk from dams, and advance beyond what is at best a lower bound estimate of the risk. The system modeling also has the potential to contribute to many other operational aspects such as whole-life-cycle asset management, water management policy and stakeholder involvement, and reservoir operation and maintenance. The proposed research will (a) develop the second generation risk analysis methodology for complex hydropower systems of dams and reservoirs. The proposed methodology will be based on general systems theory and system dynamics simulation in particular. Verification of the methodology will (b) include a real hydropower system reliability analysis. An integrated system dynamics modelling environment will be built together with the industry partner and applied to various types of hydropower system configurations. The proposed research will be conducted using case studies made available by the industry partner - BC Hydro, Burnaby, BC.